


All We Have Is Love

by kittymills



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fix It Fic, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, PINING KEITH, SHEITH - Freeform, Shiro POV, it's the love shack baby, keith pov, pining shiro, season 1 ep 1, the rise of voltron
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-15
Updated: 2018-01-15
Packaged: 2019-03-05 05:54:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13381554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittymills/pseuds/kittymills
Summary: It’s heaven when you’re next to me—  Sabrina Carpenter - All We Have Is Love





	All We Have Is Love

**Author's Note:**

> Another kind of 'fix it fic' for the very first episode because I think about these two way too much than is healthy and I just needed to write - sorry if there's any mistakes, this is was another sprint exercise

> **It’s heaven when you’re next to me**
> 
> —  _Sabrina Carpenter - All We Have Is Love_

 --

Keith can hear the three garrison cadets talking on the other side of the door but it’s too muffled to make out exactly what they’re saying and frankly, he doesn’t really care as long as they stay out of his way and out of this room. 

He briefly regrets not installing a lock on the bedroom door but he never anticipated on having any company out here to warrant it.  Well, any company that wasn’t Shiro and he wouldn’t ever need to lock his door against Shiro.

Keith turns to him now, his gaze travelling down Shiro’s long limbs.  He was tall, too tall for the old bed and his ankles hang awkwardly off the edge.  When his gaze crawls it’s way up Shiro’s torso and over his neck to his face, Keith’s heart thuds painfully against his ribs.

“What happened to you, Shiro,” he whispers hoarsely.  He gingerly slides his backside onto the mattress, careful not to jostle Shiro even though he knew that Shiro would be out for hours yet thanks to the sedatives they had administered to him.  Keith frowned to himself. If only he’d been a little bit faster, he might have made it before they jabbed him and maybe they would have taken the room down together and be sitting together with heads bent and whispering in the dark.

Keith leans closer and the scaring across Shiro’s nose and cheeks makes him want to reach out to touch him and after a brief hesitation and a reminder to himself that Shiro was currently sedated, he takes Shiro’s sharp jaw in his hand and tilts it towards him just as he did when he burst through to rescue him.  He didn’t have much time to take it in then but he did now.

The scar looked well healed, not raised or red or lumpy. It was a mere discolouration on his skin, but still not one that Keith could bare to let himself look at too closely or think about what could cause a mark like that.

It wasn’t just the scar but the pure white sock of hair that adorned his head, the way it contrasted with his black hair felt strangely ominous, like it was a part of him that no longer belonged to him, and on that thought forming, Keith’s eyes were drawn to the dark silver of the limb resting listlessly against the pale sheets of his bed.  He knew it wasn’t human and Shiro’s haunted panic that none of the techs were listening to him echoed in his head.

The energy that had been urging him to run all this time seemed to have quietened.  It was the dullest it had been in months and Keith was grateful for that.  He wasn’t sure how he would be able to process the relentless beating of it against his psyche along with trying to absorb the fact that it was Shiro lying here in front of him.

God, they’d said he was dead. Keith had mourned him until he was sick and feeling like nothing could ever make his life worth living again, almost to the point he just wanted the pain to stop choking him so much he’d toyed with the blade for hours in the darkness and wished it was a gun instead.

But it was that buzz at the back of his skull, that relentless thudding that made his jaw ache and his stomach clench if he tried to ignore it, if he tried to wander too far from the desert to escape his memories that had kept him anchored to this life and in that moment, he is so pathetically grateful that a desperate, ugly sob falls out of his chest and he’s laying his cheek against Shiro’s chest and drinking in the sound of his heart beating steadily in the darkness. 

He’s alive. _Alive, alive, alive_.

Keith can’t remember the last time he sat so still.  He knew he should pull away, that it was somehow not right to curl himself over Shiro like this, not when he his mind had been sent into oblivion to sedate his body.  A small part of him is almost pathetically grateful that he wasn’t any earlier because he would never had been able to touch Shiro like this had he been awake.

There was too much between them, too much pain and distance and even hurt. 

The memory of the last week before the mission tries to beat against his mind but he stubbornly shuts it out, instead counting the beats of Shiro’s heart and listening to the pressure against his ear drums.  He thinks about the nightmares he’d had after they’d announced the failure of the mission, of Shiro’s face turning to him and morphing from a carefree smile into something ugly and horrifying. It was always at something just over Keith’s shoulder, something he couldn’t turn to see before he was waking up gasping and crying fat tears and wanting to be sick over the edge of his bed.

Imagining Shiro’s last moments was a sick kind of torture he tried to force on himself once.  The image of Shiro dying alone amongst the heavy blackness of space, his body growing cold and stiff was something Keith tried to tell himself he deserved to suffer through, deserved to see it. Because he wasn’t there.  He hadn’t been there to save Shiro, even though he knew in his heart it was ridiculous and Shiro was beyond his reach and would probably forever be and who was he anyway? To think he could save him when no one else could. Pathetic.

He squeezes his eyes shut as a tear leaks out and trails down his cheek to land against the torn material that covered the strange undersuit Shiro wore.  It didn’t look anything like the suits the astronauts and pilots from Earth wore and belatedly, Keith came to the realisation that it probably came from the same place as Shiro’s arm.

He feels as though a long time has passed and his eyes hurt from the tears.  The voices from the other side of the door have gone quiet and he hopes they have found themselves places to rest for the night.  He feels it then, the wave of tiredness that washes over him and it’s not even a physical tiredness, the left-over adrenaline thrumming away from the rush to get Shiro away from the garrison personnel, but a soul kind of tired that his disused and broken heart was flopping on the floor like a dying fish trying to cling to life.

He’d been numb for so long and now… His shoulders shudder and he hauls himself up, wiping away the tears and cursing himself for the desperate longing that fills him whenever his eyes ghosted over the man he’d thought he’d loved and lost.  The wound still hurt, it’s edges rough and hard and bleeding again but desperate to heal.

He doesn’t even bother to pull off his boots, he just slides gingerly into the mattress and curls up at Shiro’s side and tells himself it’s just for now.  When Shiro wakes up, everything will be different and he’ll have control of himself once more.

\--

Shiro wakes slowly, his body is heavy enough and the metallic tang on his tongue is enough to remind him that he made it off the alien ship, that he made it back to earth.

That he’d tried to warn them and they’d treated him like a fucking lab rat.

He blinks, trying to bring the room into focus, but he realises the blackness in front of his eyes is because the night is still lying over him.  He tries to squint, to make his eyes adjust to make out the expanse of the room he appears to be in but he can’t make out much other than what appears to be a flimsily covered window on one side and a door on the other.

He lets his eyes drift close and concentrates on his other senses.  The air smells earthy, a peculiar scent he hasn’t smelt in what feels like years and it pangs in his chest a little bit.  It’s nothing like the smells in his scattered memories.

There’s something else, the warmth of another form next to his.  His body reacts before his mind has a chance to assess the perceived threat but he’s sluggish from the drugs and he struggles sharply on the sheets.  The mass of heat beside him rolls away instantly and he can hear them breathing hard in the darkness as he struggles to pull himself up.  His instincts aren’t firing like they should be, there is no weighed sense of danger, but his trust has been broken too many times in ways he can’t make his mind piece together that he is tragically torn between flight or fright.  His body still won’t listen him and that alone makes his heartrate climb in fear.

“Shiro.”

He hears it just as he tries to sit up again and the sound of his name in that familiar, beloved voice is like a gentle caress over his soul.  Everything about him freezes in shock, and he’s afraid to move in case he’s suffering another fever dream and if he moves even the barest inch, the voice and the being it belongs to will shatter and fall through the floorboards out of his reach.  He refuses to move even as a tear itches at the corner of his eye and his pulse races.  “Shiro,” the voice says again.

There’s a shuffle of movement from his side and then a small lamp comes to life, illuminating the room in soft golden shadows.  He’s dimly aware of the bed and the cracked walls and a door to one side but none of that registers any deeper than a brief brush over his consciousness.  Everything else is focused on _him._

“K-Keith?”

The word slips from his cracked lips, his voice harsh and grating in disbelief.  _This…. What? How?_

It must be a dream.  It must be a fever dream because how else could it be Keith in front of him right now.  Keith, of all people on this planet. 

An insidious thought curls around the base of his skull and whispers in his ear that they’ve broken him. This entire scenario is an hallucination and the aliens have broken him with the one thing he’d kept in his heart and sealed from them.  They’d broken through and now they were going to break him. He was fucked.  He was so fucked.

“No,” he hears the word fumble from his mouth.  It’s ugly and harsh and he immediately sees that’s not what Keith had expected to hear.  His face, previously alight with a steady caution and something that even Shiro’s battered mind could recognize as hope, suddenly closed off and shuttered.  His beautiful indigo hued eyes went dull and the effect on Shiro was a punch in the gut so hard it stole the breath from his lungs. 

“Is… is it really you?”

He screams internally at himself that his isn’t real, that this is just another way to break him, but the sight of Keith in front of him makes his heart leap so high in his chest he tastes heaven and he realises that if this is it, if this is the way they break him, they kill him… then this is how he wants it to happen.

He wants to die with _this_ face in front of him.

“It’s me,” Keith says then and something about the cadence of his voice doesn’t sit right.  It’s enough to make Shiro pause and he swings his heavy, fog filled head from side to side in an attempt to dispel the cloudiness marring his thoughts. 

He notices it then, once the fog dissipates slightly.  It’s Keith, but it’s also… not.

This Keith is thinner, his hair is longer and messier, as though he hasn’t bothered to cut it since the last time he sat under a blade a week before the Kerberos mission was due to take to the stars.  His jaw is sharper, tired lines around his lips and there’s a small frown line between his eyebrows that doesn’t exist in Shiro’s memories.  The dark smudges under his eyes make it look as though he hasn’t slept peacefully in months and that makes Shiro’s heart pang with guilt.  He’s not wearing his garrison uniform either. This Keith is resplendent in a deep red jacket and he looks far older than the eighteen years he wore on his skin when Shiro left.

Under his scrutiny, Keith shifts uncomfortably and looks away, unable to meet Shiro’s eyes.  “I know this must be a lot to take in,” he says then.  His voice is measured, careful and as though he was seeing it as vividly as he was watching it outside his mind’s eye, he sees Keith building up his walls brick by brick.  Against him. 

That hurts.  Not the physical kind of hurt but the kind that melts through his bones and into the depths of the very essence of him, because he’s the reason those walls had fallen in the first place. 

But that’s what happens when you break a promise. 

It was odd almost, to be back here on Earth knowing what he’s endured, that the universe existed and thrived and lived and died on a scale that not even his human mind could comprehend. 

At least… He tries to search his memories for some sort of pattern or clue to the events of the last time slice but everything is jumbled and elusive.  The more he tries to reach for a memory, the harder it skitters away into the darkness until Shiro stops himself from trying least those memories disappear into the abyss in his mind to never return.

“How… how are you here?” he whispers and Keith’s form is rigid for a heartbeat before the tension fades and Shiro can visibly see how much he’s hurting. He wants to open his arms to Keith, to pull him into an embrace so tight he imagines their bodies melding together and they take from each other what they need to soothe and love and laugh and _survive_.

The glint of light from the lamp on his hand makes him swallow hard and turn away instead.

“We took you from the garrison,” he says finally and Shiro frowns.

“We?”

“Yeah, I had… I had help.”

Shiro supposes that’s a conversation for another day.  He’s still too foggy and weary trying to piece it all together now.  He lowers his head down and threads his fingers through the white patch of his hair as his eyes close briefly.  At first, he blames the grogginess on the sedatives but there’s more there, some kind of block that is preventing him from making any sense.  He lets out a frustrated sigh and Keith immediately steps closer.  That almost makes him want to laugh- he’s sure anyone else would step back from him, broken memories and metal limbs but of course Keith would be the one to face him head on.

He raises his head and their gazes lock and Shiro almost forgets to breath in the face of that intensity.

_I missed you._

He tastes the words on his tongue but he doesn’t say them. He can’t. He gave away that privilege like a fool a long time ago. He tries to focus on the present, stumbling when he remembers he doesn’t even know what the present is.  “Where are we?”

Keith shrugs a little, as though the answer should be obvious.  And maybe it should be, to the old Shiro, the Shiro that wasn’t so muddled with a head full of broken memories and a metal arm.

He remembers that clearly enough and he looks down at it, raising his hands to flex his fingers against his palm and begrudgingly marveling at the way it feels so real, like it really was his own flesh and blood. 

When he looks up, Keith is staring at him. His eyes flick downwards and Shiro can see the question in Keith’s eyes like neon lights lining a casino strip.  “I don’t know…” Shiro says after a moment.  “I don’t remember. I don’t remember much at all.”

Keith doesn’t respond for a moment and then he rubs his face, scattering his strands of dark hair across his head. Shiro’s fingers itch with the need to touch him but he’s too cowardly to reach for him.  There’s still a chance he might disappear.

“Maybe you should rest some more.  It’s the middle of the night and… you’ve been through a lot.”

 _So have you,_ he almost says but his mouth can’t keep up with his brain so he nods instead and hangs his head. He wants to slump on the mattress but he wants that warmth against him like when he first woke.  Was that weak? Was that that selfish that he is desperate for that human contact after so long alone.  He has to bite his lip to stop the words from spilling out his mouth like magma he can’t scoop back up but it’s almost like Keith is in his head because he steps closer and reaches a gloved hand out and places it on Shiro’s shoulder.  The touch is so warm and familiar it grabs Shiro by the throat and squeezes so hard that for a moment he can’t breathe.

“I’ll be right here,” Keith says and his voice is soft even as his eyes are tired and his lips are sad. “I won’t go anywhere.”

It’s then that Keith pushes gently on his shoulder and he doesn’t have the strength to fight against it.  He lets Keith guide him back down, laying his head against a pillow that he realises belatedly that smells like Keith’s hair.  The fist around his heart squeezes once more then releases and he lets his eyes drift closed.  He’s aware of a small shuffle and then the light is out and the room is dark again.  Keith’s hand shifts from his shoulder to skim down his still human arm to twists his fingers against Shiro’s own.

Shiro focuses on that grip, savouring the way it feels and inch by slow inch, his body starts to relax and his brain tumbles off the cliff into sleep.


End file.
